Doris Langley Moore - novelist, biographer of Byron, ballet aficionado, costume designer - was an unusual figure even by mid-century British standards. She designed the costumes for several British films, wrote serious literary criticism, and quietly built up a body of historical dress that no museum was bothering to preserve. Edwardian and Victorian fashion in 1925 was simply old clothes. Moore saw what they were: documents of how women had lived, what they had been allowed to do, how they had presented themselves. She bought, traded and accepted pieces for decades, and when she gave the collection to Bath in 1963 she was making an argument that has since become orthodoxy - that fashion is a form of social history, and that the body is one of its primary archives.

The collection runs from the late sixteenth century to the present. The earliest items are embroidered linen shirts and supple leather gloves - the kinds of things that survived because they were tucked into family chests and forgotten, the gloves still smelling faintly of the herbs used to scent them. From there the holdings move through Restoration mantuas, eighteenth-century court dress with their absurd panniers, Regency muslin gowns of the kind Jane Austen's heroines actually wore, Victorian crinolines and bustles, Edwardian tea gowns, flapper dresses, Dior's New Look, Mary Quant, Vivienne Westwood. About a hundred thousand objects in all, ranging from couture to working clothes. The museum has long shown only a small fraction at any time, rotating displays so that fabrics can rest in the dark between exhibitions, because fabric remembers light and light eats fabric.

From 1963 to 2023 the museum lived in the basement and lower floors of the Bath Assembly Rooms - the John Wood the Younger building of 1771 where Georgian Bath had once danced, played cards, taken tea and conducted the unmarried business of finding a husband. It was a fitting home: the rooms had been the social engine of the Regency, the very place where Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey watches the people watching her. Then the Assembly Rooms passed back to the National Trust, who wanted to restore them as Georgian interiors, and the fashion collection had to find a new building. The chosen site is the Old Post Office in Bath, a Victorian building close to the city centre, currently being refitted as a purpose-built museum.

While the Old Post Office is prepared, the collection moved to an unexpected interim home: the headquarters of Dent's, the luxury glovemakers in Warminster. Dent's have been making fine leather gloves since 1777, and their building offered both the climate control and the sympathetic atmosphere a hundred thousand garments need. There is something quietly perfect about a fashion museum spending its waiting years among glovemakers - a hundred thousand objects, including those late sixteenth-century gloves where the collection begins, lodged with the descendants of the trade that made them. The museum has welcomed about 100,000 visitors a year in normal times. When it reopens in Bath, the queues will form again, and the long, careful argument that Doris Langley Moore started in the 1920s will continue.